Month: January 2022
American’s Excess Savings During Pandemic
AMERICA’S FISCAL largesse during the pandemic has fuelled not just economic growth but also, more surprisingly, a lively hip-hop niche. Over the past two years musicians have released no fewer than 30 different songs referring to the government’s stimulus cheques, known as stimmies. “Yeah, check, I need a stimmy. S-T-I-double M-Y, tell ‘em gimme,” raps
wood pellets as a green energy source
Many of these US trees are destined to be turned into small pellets for the biomass industry. At wood pellet mills, wood is chipped, dried, ground and compressed into uniform, easily storable pellets. They’re then shipped mainly to the UK, where they’re burned for energy. Most forest land in North Carolina is privately owned, in
open source app Man arrested
Police in India have arrested a man suspected of creating an app that put up photos of more than 80 Muslim women for “sale” online last year. The 25-year-old was arrested days after a similar app – Bulli Bai – uploaded photos of more than 100 Muslim women. Four students, including a 21-year-old student who
Tesla assertive self-driving modes
The setting will follow other cars more closely, change lanes more frequently, not leave the overtaking lane, and perform rolling stops. Such driver behaviour by humans is often discouraged by safety groups. However, it could sometimes be safer for an automated system to be more assertive, like a human driver, rather than being overly cautious,
Moxie Marlinspike leaves signal
Signal recently enabled crypto-currency payments within the app, which has concerned some users. Moxie Marlinspike, the co-founder and chief executive of encrypted-messaging app Signal, has resigned. He blogged it was a “good time to replace myself as CEO” after working on Signal for over a decade. Mr Marlinspike – who changed his name from Matthew
AI for musicians
Mr Mitchell is the founder and boss of a website and app called Boomy, which helps its users create their own songs using artificial intelligence (AI) software that does most of the heavy lifting. You choose from a number of genres, click on “create song”, and the AI will compose one for you in less
OpenSea valued at more than $13bn
The platform enables trade in NFTs (non-fungible tokens), unique pieces of digital code that can be associated with a digital asset such as a work of digital art. OpenSea says trades on the platform rose 600-fold last year, but some critics say the valuation is too high. But others argue the spiralling valuations of some
Italian mafia Arrested
Gioacchino Gammino, 61, was found in Galapagar, Spain, where he was living under the name Manuel. An Italian mafia boss who has been on the run for decades has been arrested after he was spotted on Google Maps. A Google Street View shot showing a man resembling Gammino standing in front of a grocery shop
Bulli Bai app
The app “Bulli Bai” – was hosted on GitHub, which has since taken it down amid widespread anger and outrage. Indian police have arrested the alleged creator of an app that shared photos of more than 100 Muslim women saying they were on “sale”. This was the second attempt in months to harass Muslim women
delivery to the Moon
A US spacecraft has not made a soft landing on the Moon since the last of the Apollo missions in 1972. (The LCROSS mission in 2009 deliberately crashed a vehicle into the Moon to examine the material kicked up by the impact) Nova-C could change that when it blasts into space atop a SpaceX rocket